As smart phones (e.g., Apple's iPhone and Google's Android) and other mobile devices (e.g., Apple's iPad) gain popularity, smart phone users are increasingly using diverse mobile applications to perform everyday activities, such as email, social networking, news reading, banking, and the like. A typical smart phone user may use 20-30 different applications installed on his/her smart phone. In addition, many Web destinations are disaggregating their sites, and making pieces or portions of those sites into mobile applications that can be downloaded to, and installed on, smart phones. As the number of applications grows, users are increasingly faced with the problem of searching through an increasing number of applications in order to find applications that are relevant or useful to tasks they wish to perform. This scenario is similar to the early days of the Web. That is, as the size of the Web increased, more scalable and efficient solutions (e.g., better search engines) were needed to help users better navigate and search for relevant Web sites.
A difference between mobile platforms and the Web is that, due to the nature of mobile devices (e.g., small screen size, limited input modalities) and how users interact with those devices, user interaction is often more focused and vertically-oriented. Thus, the traditional keyword-based search engines that work well on the Web are no longer sufficient for mobile platforms. It is frequently cumbersome to type in or copy and paste keyword queries on a mobile device, and then have to browse dozens of results before finding relevant results.
As another problem, there is little or no interaction between mobile applications, and no common standards for intercommunication. Thus, it is not be convenient or efficient to analyze information or user's actions with respect to one application, and then use that information to perform functions with another application